Weird Tech: Why you shouldn't eat your SNES

It's not why you think...

Shares

The weird world of tech never fails to entertain. What's the least plausible scenario you can image involving Mortal Kombat and a bolt of lightning? We're guessing it probably doesn't feature an 18-year-old playing on a SNES with a gamepad in his mouth...

Unfortunately this was precisely the fate to befall one Brazilian teenager this week. All the more unfortunate when you consider the opposite luck experienced by the English teenager we mentioned last week who ended up with a cool 65,400 euros (£44,000) cash after buying a PS2 on eBay.

Random fact of the week: apparently, 25 per cent of Brits are content to answer the phone while on the toilet . Even more enlightening is the knowledge that if you own a smartphone you're twice as likely to do so as other phone users. Valuable information indeed.

Worldwide rage

It's been an angry old week. A 27-year-old man was sentenced to seven years in prison after he drove 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas and set fire to another man's trailer after being called a "nerd" over the internet. He should have stopped... counted to 10... and visited the laughing Wii baby on YouTube.

And in a show of non-tech related momentary genius, a group of inmates copyrighted their names before demanding millions of dollars from the prison they were in for using their names without permission. Sadly it ended with further charges of extortion, but 10 out of 10 for thinking outside the box. We like.

Our favourite non-tech related story in the last seven days though, was Oscar the nursing home cat. Check out his morbidly uncanny knack for predicting when patients are about to kick the bucket .

One extremely common happening in the world of tech is the announcement, and ensuing disappearance, of products. Case in point: Samsonite's Bluetooth Suitcase . First announced back in 2002 with promises to make it to market later that year, the Bluetooth suitcase still has yet to emerge. We imagine (hope) a similar fate will befall Apple's ' DRM For Chargers ' patent. And maybe the torturous Illuminated Tweezers as well.

And finally

In an elegant demonstration of irony, an Australian news article blaming Wikipedia for unreliable information got its facts wrong this week. The story falsely named Wikipedia as the source of incorrect information which was used as the basis for a tribunal ruling - the actual site was an entirely different wiki-based encyclopaedia. Oops.